Top 5 of Personal Qualities of a Tester

As a software tester, I often perform such tasks that are not directly related to the implementation of the testing: the management of the team of testers, business analysis, account management, training of personnel, test automation.

As for me, this combination of roles looks natural, but that not all experts in our field are doing something different from the creation of test documentation, test execution and recording of defects. It is difficult to answer unambiguous to the question is it bad or good. I decided to find out who and under what circumstances may take “no test” tasks, and most importantly – who needs it.

So My Top 5 By the Degree of Increasing Importance.

5-th Place

Without experiencing difficulties with the definition of the first four places I thought about the fifth place. I failed to mark something clearly related to testing, so I immediately gave the fifth place to three characteristics, the presence of which I consider is necessary for achieving success in any job. There are perseverance, responsibility and common sense. Comments, I suppose, are not necessary.

4-th place: Incredulity

A good tester should not blindly trust anyone. Doubt and mistrust must push the tester to verify the implementation, no matter how much the developers convince that everything works flawlessly, to study critical the requirements, no matter how credible was the person who written it, and certainly in doubt refer to situations where someone will argue something, referring to someone’s words that he had not personally heard. By the way, confrontations are useful not only in detective investigations, but also in testing.

3rd place: Curiosity

The fact that the tester must be curious, you can already take as a banal classic. Bad is the tester, which had the test, study or observation of something and have no question, such as “What if?”. That curiosity will force the tester to go on new unknown ways, opening new and new problems and bottlenecks. And only an innate curiosity will make testing natural and transform it into pleasure.

2 nd place: Indifferent

Slightly on the sore – I consider that indifference is common disease of our time. But the tester should not be indifferent to the fate of the project, he should not spit on the users who have to suffer from poor quality products, the tester must worry what will happen to mistake that he found, and the tester should not pretend that nothing happened, if in front of him at least his corner flashed a problem.

1 st place: Attention

It maybe a little weird, what a simple feature I put in the first place. But after reflection and disappointments based on mistakes, I have come to realize how attention is important for the tester in the broad sense of the word. You can start with a simple – namely inattention often leads to mistakes, so to find them you have to be careful.

And then – more: the tester should be careful even with small details, because details are creating a general impression, the tester should be very attentive to what he says and what he sees, because any information can be very useful and important; and, of course, the tester should be very careful with things that he does himself, because the tester of course can make mistakes, and there’s no getting away, but it is better to do it as less as possible. Otherwise, the testing can lose confidence. And how long should be the chain of testers who testing testers?

If you want to know how QA Team Lead spends his day, then read the article.